Rhea Drozdenko

Professor Dolata

English 102

November 1, 2010

Vanity

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror,” is a blunt and unbiased view of female vanity. The

poem deals with the obsessions we all have about our ever-changing faces. Age is

portrayed as a horrible thing that happens to everyone. This poem is interesting because it

has two speakers; each being inanimate objects. The speaker in the first stanza is a mirror,

and in the seconds stanza it becomes a lake.

The speaker of the first nine lines is an ordinary, rectangular mirror in a young

woman’s room. This mirror is absolutely truthful and unbiased; whatever it sees, it

reflects back “Just as it is” (3). It is absolutely truthful, as it should be; “unmisted by love

or dislike” (3). Its honesty seems almost cruel at times, but the mirror is not trying to be

mean, it is just doing its job. It is the “eye of a little god;” it sees everything and is at the

same time unprejudiced (5).

Even though the mirror possesses some human qualities, it most closely relates to

another inanimate object, the opposite wall. The mirror spends most of its time staring

straight ahead at the “pink [wall], with speckles” (7). All that the mirror has ever had is

that wall for such a long time. It feels very connected to that opposite wall which, like the

mirror, never moves; saying “I think it is a part of my heart” (8).

This quiet companion isn’t always there though. The mirror is well-used by
people; so, faces often appear in the view of the mirror. And the mirror always reflects

back faithfully. The wall “flickers” (8). The mirror and the wall are constantly separated,

“over and over” (9). What this means is that the girl, who is young and concerned with

her appearance, looks in the mirror often.

In the second stanza, the speaker becomes a lake that has a woman staring into it.

This is a classical allusion to Narcissus, a man of Greek mythology. Narcissus was a vain

man that was so in love with his looks that he could not stop looking at his own reflection

in a lake. The woman is like Narcissus because she is very concerned with what she looks

like. She is worried and is frantic looking for her inner beauty, “searching [the lake’s]

reaches for what she really is” (11).

In line 12, the speaker introduces us to the liars: “the candles or the moon.” These

sources of indirect light are called liars because they don’t show what things really look

like. They alter reality subtly. On the other hand, the lake is honest and faithful. However,

the woman prefers the liars, turning her back to the lake. She doesn’t appreciate the lake’s

honesty. “She rewards [the lake] with tears and an agitation of hands” (14).

Every morning the woman comes back to look for the young girl that was once

her. But she is gone, “drowned” in the lake, and the woman mourns her loss. The young

girl will never be reflected back to the woman, instead she will stay in the lake. Instead of

the young girl coming back, an old woman “rises toward her day after day, like a terrible

fish” (18). The middle-aged woman knows that the old woman will reach her eventually;

so she is restless, desperately looking for the young girl which is never coming back. In

the end, the old woman will reach her and swallow her whole, just like a “terrible fish”
(18).

This poem is about many things. It speaks of women’s vanity, something which

all of us contain to some degree. We often stare into the mirror, wishing to see something

that just isn’t there. Also, Plath addresses how sometimes people prefer lies to truth.